Peru

Some of Peru's top government officials, including President Ollanta Humala, are former army officers who spent the 1980s fighting Maoist Shining Path guerrillas. Both sides committed massive human rights abuses, but now one particularly brutal episode is coming back to haunt the Humala administration.

Two murdered journalists for the
Africa service of Radio France Internationale, Ghislaine Dupont, 51, and Claude
Verlon, 58, might have had a chance. They were abducted on November 2 in Kidal
in northern Mali, but the vehicle their captors were driving suddenly broke
down, according to news
reports.

Lately, we have come to expect violence against
journalists in certain regions, such as the Middle East. But here at CPJ, 2011
has also been troubling for the number of journalists killed in an entirely
different part of the world, the Americas.

Keiko Fujimori and Ollanta Humala, the two candidates for
the June 5 presidential runoff in Peru, barely raised freedom of
expression issues during the political campaign. So Friday's event organized by
the regional press group Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS) in Lima provided a
great opportunity to measure their commitment on press freedom, especially
important for candidates with questionable democratic credentials.

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We will not make significant advances in the battle against crimes against journalists and the impunity surrounding them without the creation of a sense of unity and solidarity among a country’s news media and journalists. Nor will the cause advance without a strategy by international press freedom organizations to provide support for those two values.

Caretas, the leading newsweekly magazine in Perú, has a
shocking photograph on its February
18 cover: a local judge aiming a gun at one of the publication’s reporters.
Photojournalist Carlos Saavedra was on a stakeout trying to photograph Judge Raúl
Rosales Mora when the incident occurred on February 13, according to CPJ interviews
and local news reports.

The magazine was working on a story about a controversial decision by Rosales, who had recently favored the appointment of a polemical judge to the country’s Constitutional Tribunal, the Peruvian press reported.